Month: March 2017

Brett Scott explores the emerging cashless economy in Aeon magazine. Is ubiquitous digital payment the harbinger of a glorious future, or a smokescreen for powerful interests that want to control (and undermine) choice and capitalism?

This is no longer a deal between me and the seller. I am now dealing with a complex of unknown third parties, profit-seeking money-passers who stand between us to act as facilitators of the money flow, but also as potential gatekeepers. If a gatekeeper doesn’t want to do business with me, I can’t do business with the seller. They have the ability to jam, monitor or place conditions upon that glorious core ritual of capitalism – the transfer of money for the transfer of goods. This innocuous device exudes mechanical indifference, reporting only to invisible bosses far away, running invisible algorithms in invisible black boxes that don’t like me.

It all begins with a campaign in which we all agree to refrain from all carnal relations for the equivalent of one human lifetime.

On the day that the last human expires – and with him or her – symbolic language, this will be the end of all evil (at least until the next symbol using and abusing species evolves).

Without war, without conflict, without any physical harm whatsoever including the added bonus of the absence of any semblance of carnal immorality!

If language is the locust of all evil (as opposed to supernatural causes), and language is an invention of symbol-using and ab-using animals (humans), and if sexual behavior is implicated in the pro-creation of humans, then the most reasonable and logical solution is to abstain from behavior which is not only itself a locust of contention, but the ultimate cause thereof.

If our ultimate motive was the elimination of all evil, our proposal above seems the most reasonable, logical, and moral course of human action at our disposal; we will weep for the unborn centuries from now just as much as we, the unknown, were wept for in centuries past (which I dare say was equivalent to the slightest whisper of a single dying wind) due to our progenitor’s uncertainty regarding our existence.

Thus our manifest will is towards the will-to-Good in conjunction with the will-to Power, regardless of any “evil” consequences. We continue carnal relations unabated (just as our animal relatives) because it is in our nature and our nature is the will to the Goodness of nature including all endocronic responses.

Therefore in order to bring an end to all evil, we would have to contradict our very nature, the nature which is the architect of our motives regardless of how much we proclaim the unacceptability of “evil.”

It is precisely at this point that the supernatural paradigm intervenes providing a scape-goat mechanism for the contradictory and subjective nature of subjective language. Through mystification we differ our logical fallacies – in their limitless manifestations – into the lap of the Gods.

Thus “evil” is externalized and separated from the human will as an essential supernatural force to be overcome as opposed to a function of language itself. Through mystification we get to have our cake and eat it too; not according to reason or logic, but ironically, as a function of the subjective nature of language.